Greene County announcing plan to fix Farm Road 193

GREENE COUNTY, Mo.- A low water crossing east of Springfield has been creating a detour for those in that area for months now. Farm Road 193 has a low water crossing over Pierson Creek that was destroyed by multiple rounds of flood water and debris.

Since March, Greene County Highway Administrator Adam Humphrey and the county have been working on a plan for a permanent fix to the area in hopes of preventing a closure like this again.

“I think in the long run it’ll be time well spent developing a good design that should last us for many years to come,” Humphrey said.

In February, a severe storm with flash flooding rolled through the Ozarks, causing damage to Farm Road 193.

“During that flood event, we sustained some major damage to the crossing itself. There was some large debris that was washed up in over the crossing,” Humphrey said. “And we made the decision back at that time to come back in here and do some major repairs to it to try to get it back open to traffic and to get it passable again.”

At that time, Humphrey said they also began looking at a redesign of the area to prevent this from happening again. Then just a few months later, a similar storm rolled through the Ozarks, having similar impacts to the crossing.

“We came out and evaluated the damage, the most notable issue that we found at that time, those large metal pipe culverts that were there, the foundation of that crossing, they had some major holes and gaps in them that made it just really, for all practical purposes, impossible to repair,” Humphrey said.

Joseph Soldeo lives on Blackthorn Lane, off Farm Road 193. He says this crossing hasn’t just been a problem for him, but his neighbors as well.

“So, it eroded out the soil underneath the road surface so that when somebody drove over it in the storm, there was nothing supporting the road anymore,” Soldeo said. “There’s a big old hole and it totaled somebody’s car down the street, one of our neighbors.”

He says it has been frustrating for him and his family to get to where they need to be.

“Normally if we were heading out to the freeway, we would just take a right out of our road here and go down that and cross the bridge and it’d be straight shot out to Menards and Costco,” Humphrey said. “Highways nice and convenient like that. Otherwise, now we have to turn the other direction. It’s a little farther to get to things and a little harder to get back into our house.”

The timeline for repairs starts in October when contractors will be available to bid on the project, but work on the actual bridge won’t begin until the new year and may not be completed until March or April.

“The last thing that has to happen before we open these projects to traffic would be final asphalt paving, tying the, you know, the roadway approaches into the new bridge,” Humphrey said. “That work is not something that’s very suitable in cold weather months. We need to get into a springtime weather time period where that asphalt work can be done.”

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